The Raspberry Pi foundation is frustrated, too.

The Raspberry Pi foundation attempted to launch its $35 Linux computer on Tuesday evening, but the organization's retail partners couldn't cope with the massive demand. Two British electronic component distributors that intended to sell the product were unable to do so--their websites went down, succumbing to the stampede of eager enthusiasts who sought to purchase the hotly-anticipated system.

The product is a bare board with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. It's roughly the size of a deck of playing cards and has a powerful GPU that is reportedly competitive with that of modern smartphones. Developer prototypes of the product have been shown running impressive graphics demos and decoding high-definition video.

The Raspberry Pi foundation originally began developing the computer with the aim of producing a low-cost system that could be used to teach computer programming to young students. The project has attracted a much larger audience, however, and has gained a tremendous following among Linux users and embedded systems enthusiasts who want to use it for purposes ranging from wearable computing experiments to multimedia set-top box.

The product entered the manufacturing stage last month and was expected to finally launch this week, after a few minor delays. In a launch announcement that appeared on the Raspberry Pi website on Tuesday night, the organization explained that it had partnered with licensed manufacturers who would handle distribution for the first batch of units and then handle both manufacturing and distribution on behalf of the Raspberry Pi foundation going forward. The two companies are Premier Farnell and RS Components.

The foundation has been working with manufacturers in China, but can only handle production in increments of 10,000 units. By transitioning to a licensed manufacturer model, the foundation hopes to ensure that there will eventually be enough units available to meet demand. Although it's likely the right move in the long run, the partnership is off to a rocky start. The websites of both vendors were inaccessible after the launch due to excessive traffic.

At the time of publication, the Farnell website is still spitting errors. The RS site has been partially restored and is intermittently available, but isn't currently allowing users to purchase the Raspberry Pi. Instead, it displays a screen where users can register to express their interest in the product. The Raspberry Pi foundation managed to withstand the traffic by temporarily replacing the contents of its official website with a static page

Alongside the launch, the Raspberry Pi foundation also announced that the cheaper $25 model, which will be launched at an undisclosed future date, got a spec bump and will have 256MB of RAM, just like the $35 model. The $25 board was originally expected to have only 128MB of RAM. The cheaper model will still lack several of the features found in the $35 model, such as the built-in ethernet controller.

Update: The Farnell website has been partially restored. Some readers are reporting that they have been able to successfully place orders. I still haven't managed to get through the whole process without encountering errors yet.

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I couldn't even get to Farnell's. I got stuck "expressing an interest" at RS Components. According to Twitter, RS won't be selling them until later in the week. :\It's like the Pandora all over again, except with less waiting and disappointment.

Yeah, I "expressed" at RS, too. I got in before the wave of traffic crushed the site, but there were folks on Twitter saying that there was a different page. Never found one, though, so I don't know how true that is.

Taking pre-orders from a month ago would have really been the way to go with this. I think nearly 100k are interested in this product, and from the previous news there were 10k available.

Clearly, they should have gone through Kickstarter. Would have been enjoyable to watch the commitment level go up, and track their sales that way. They could have easily reached 10,000 units, probably more like 50,000 units, with a few million over the next 3-4 months.

Yeah, I "expressed" at RS, too. I got in before the wave of traffic crushed the site, but there were folks on Twitter saying that there was a different page. Never found one, though, so I don't know how true that is.

Taking pre-orders from a month ago would have really been the way to go with this. I think nearly 100k are interested in this product, and from the previous news there were 10k available.

I wish the foundation had realized that you can never 'express' an interest too soon.......I would have pre-ordered one of these 6 months ago, if not more.....now all I have to lean on is the fact that Farnell sent me an email stating that I had registered an account, and could now order product....assuming (of course) that I could get the page to load first.

In closing, making 10,000 units was a mistake. Ten times that amount would have been more appropriate, and considering the intention to distribute to schools adding another zero wouldn't be out of line either.

In closing, making 10,000 units was a mistake. Ten times that amount would have been more appropriate, and considering the intention to distribute to schools adding another zero wouldn't be out of line either.

The first batch was never intended to hit schools, it was to put units into the hands of people that wanted to do things with them so that there'd be a lot of off-beat poking, prodding, testing, and interesting projects in the wild before any class was using them.They said earlier that pre-orders wouldn't be possible for some reason. Can't recall exactly what it was.

I too am disappointed that this is an announcement of an announcement rather than a final launch. However I do understand that by using RS/Farnell they are creating a long term supply channel appropriate to a volume product. More concerning is that the two channels seem to have different pricing.

In closing, making 10,000 units was a mistake. Ten times that amount would have been more appropriate, and considering the intention to distribute to schools adding another zero wouldn't be out of line either.

The first batch was never intended to hit schools, it was to put units into the hands of people that wanted to do things with them so that there'd be a lot of off-beat poking, prodding, testing, and interesting projects in the wild before any class was using them.They said earlier that pre-orders wouldn't be possible for some reason. Can't recall exactly what it was.

I suspect the 10k initial build would have something to do with the Raspberry PI foundations financial resources, 100k units would require something like $2M up front to purchase components.

I could be wrong, but I believe some of the folks involved in the foundation mortgaged their houses to pay for the first 10k units, before the 2 companies were willing to handle the manufacturing/distribution.

As someone who grew up with the BBC Model A and Model B computers, resurrecting those iconic names for this launch brings back fond(ish) memories of typing in page after page of program listings from the back pages of PCW . Would be nice to think this can rekindle that interest in today's youth. At least it's now a much cheaper way of finding out if programming is for you.

I could be wrong, but I believe some of the folks involved in the foundation mortgaged their houses to pay for the first 10k units, before the 2 companies were willing to handle the manufacturing/distribution.

If that's really the case then it's just another argument for having gone through Kickstarter instead..

I think the problem with that might have been that Kickstarter is unavailable in the UK (without a US bank account), and the Foundation is a UK registered charity.

Also they really didn't want to be labeled as vaporware. A friend paid for some mini oil analysis devices on Kickstarter and has yet to receive the product years later. For months now the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been saying they didn't want to sell anything until they had the product in hand.

What did they expect after making a fuss of their product in all the tech (and general) media for the past 6 months and then refusing to take preorders or do an organized lottery for the first units. This was an inevitability, though I'm quite surprised how bad their communication and planning with their suppliers really was. They did literally everything wrong on all counts, about the only thing they managed to do successfully was realize they'd need to switch to static content on their website and have that going from the start.

I haven't really analyzed the particulars of ordering through a British/International component company (is anyone outside of England happy about this?) but it's interesting that they've silently exceeded their price target. It's not by a large amount but it moves them from being people who do what they say they're going to do to... not.

I hear it's pretty good but never updates beyond version 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609 or so.

Considering that large multinational companies have problems fulfilling the demand for their products, I think the sense of entitlement is ridiculous.I always assumed Rasberry Pi was a small self-financed startup run by a few guys in a shed. It's not surprising that they lack the capital and infrastructure to support the geek equivalent of an iPhone launch.It's been out for one fucking day, and everyone's is OUTRAGED that their website went down for a few hours. Seriously, just wait a few days (or weeks). You will not be made a social outcast because you don't have the latest miniature computing device on launch day.

Nobody expected them to fulfill all the orders today. But with their smug attitude when responding to people's concerns about the demand, and their continual pushing of the device when it was quite clear they wouldn't come remotely close to fulfilling it, I think 'blame' for the clusterfuck rests square with them.

It would have been relatively easy to handle this in elegant fashion, do a lottery or preorders. But instead of doing that, they smugly dismissed such suggestions and said don't worry we can handle it. Then fail in spectacular fashion on release day to get the most basic things right - no links to product pages increasing load on their distribs, distributors that don't even know about the product, apparently no sales outside of Europe, and in other cases no sales to individuals, pre-announcing the announcement to guarantee the sharpest peak possible (and to waste the maximum amount of time of those trying to get one), and then perhaps worst of all, have no communication channel with the distributors to get any of the issues resolved. They didn't even update their static content to reflect the problems.

Really I don't think any retailer would have been able to deal with a launch like this gracefully. These people work in tech, I'm sure they see companies like Apple and Sony screw up big product launches regularly, they really should have known that directing 100s of thousands of people at their distributors at exactly the same time wasn't going to work no matter who those distributors were, especially when people on their forums and elsewhere constantly cautioned them that this was too big to drop in this way.

Scream entitlement all you like, but I think people are more annoyed by the magnitude of fail and myopia represented here, not because they didn't get one today.

Agree on all the self-entitlement moaning going on... My understanding of this project was that it was an initiative to give schoolchildren in the UK a free or nearly-free device to encourage programming (hence the namecheck of the old BBC Model A/B in the product names, from the 'glory days' of home computing). So long as that objective is reached then who cares if the initial run was over-subscribed or some devices end up on ebay... The true measure of this project will be if it encourages UK schoolchildren to get under the hood once more, not whether it's globally available for all on launch day.

The initial run of 10,000 was about as many as they could get funding for. Now they have capital and demonstrable demand, they can go on to get some serious volumes into production (hopefully!)

Yes, they were wrong (in a good way) about the demand for the Raspberry Pi. But presumably they'd had assurances from RS & Farnell, and took those at face value. I think they deserve a bit more slack than many (especially on Twitter, it seems) are willing to cut them